Experiential Intensity of Exploring Place Abandoned

There is a growing global shift towards urbanization resulting in diminishing connections with the traditional rural placescape. Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) has a long history of out-migration and internal migration between communities in coastal areas within the province. Resettlement programs initiated by the NL government between 1954 and 1975 accounted for the internal migration of approximately 30,000 people from 300 communities. Modern-day encounters with these abandoned communities are relevant to understanding the loss of place and home, as significant numbers of students in NL today are affected by migration. This paper is a phenomenological study of the experiences of educators as they explored the remnants of an abandoned community. The participants of the study were six experienced public school educators with teaching experience at the primary, elementary, intermediate, and secondary levels. The study took place in eight abandoned communities located on the western shore of Placentia Bay, where mainly the remnants of Isle Valen, St. Leonard’s, St. Kyran’s, and Great Paradise were explored. Data collection consisted of two personal interviews and one group hermeneutic circle, with the aim to answer one fundamental question: What is the experience of educators exploring the remnants of an abandoned community? Data in this study are represented by lived experience descriptions, which were interpreted hermeneutically and guided by four phenomenological existentials: temporality, corporeality, spatiality, and relationality. The results of this study not only provide deeper insight into intense experiences in communities abandoned through resettlement; they also reveal the significance of place in our lives, place as heuristic teacher, the pedagogical power of place, the need for local, meaningful place-based experiences in a curriculum as lived, and their potential for furthering personal and educational insight no matter where in this world we live or dwell.

Observing and Modeling the Response of Placentia Bay to an Extratropical Cyclone

An extratropical cyclone reported to have the largest wind speed in Newfoundland in morethan a decade landed on the island of Newfoundland on 11 March 2017. The oceanic responses inPlacentia Bay on the southeast coast of Newfoundland to the winter storm were examined usingobserved data and the Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM). The peak non-tidal waterlevel increase, i.e., storm surge, reached 0.85mat St. Lawrence and 0.77mat Argentia on Placentia Bay.Sea surface temperature slightly decreased after the storm passage according to buoy and satellitemeasurements. Root mean square dierences (RMSD) of the magnitude of storm surge between modelresults and observations are 0.15 m. The model sea surface temperature showed a small decrease,consistent with observations, with RMSDs from 0.19 to 0.64 C at buoy stations. The simulatedsurface current changes agree with buoy observations, with model-observation velocity dierenceratios (VDR) of 0.75–0.88. It was found that, at Argentia (St. Lawrence), the peak storm surge inPlacentia Bay was dominantly (moderately) associated with the inverse barometric eect, and thesubsequent negative surge was mainly due to the wind eect at both stations. The sea surface coolingwas associated with oceanic heat loss. In the momentum balance, the Coriolis, pressure gradient,and advection terms were all important during the storm, while the first two terms were predominantbefore and after the storm.

Improving the efficiency of the Fukui trap as a capture tool for the invasive European green crab (Carcinus maenas) in Newfoundland, Canada

The European green crab (Carcinus maenas) is a crustacean species native to European and North African coastlines that has become one of the world’s most successful marine invasive species. Targeted fishing programs aimed at removing green crabs from invaded ecosystems commonly use Fukui multi-species marine traps. Improving the efficiency of these traps would improve the ability to respond to green crab invasions. In this study, we developed four distinct trap modifications that were designed to facilitate the successful capture of green crabs, with the goal of improving the performance of the Fukui trap. We tested these modificationsin situduring the summer of 2016 at two locations in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. We discovered that three of our modified Fukui trap designs caught significantly more green crabs than the standard Fukui trap, increasing catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) by as much as 81%. We conclude that our top-performing modifications have great potential for widespread use with existing Fukui traps that are being used for green crab removal efforts.

Otolith chemistry and redistributions of Northern cod: evidence of Smith Sound – Bonavista Corridor connectivity

Stable oxygen isotope assays of otoliths (δ18Ooto) from migrant Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua Linnaeus, 1758) that overwintered in Smith Sound, Newfoundland, during 1995–2006 differed from those of nonmigrating summer residents and cod from Placentia Bay and Halibut Channel but did not differ from those of cod from the adjacent offshore Bonavista Corridor in summer. All fish sampled were of the 1990 year class (founder of the Smith Sound aggregation) at ages 8–10 years. Hence, overwintering Smith Sound and summering Bonavista Corridor cod likely experienced similar temperatures and salinities in each year of life, representing different migration stages of an intermixed group. Moreover, predictions of δ18Ooto from near-bottom ocean temperatures and salinities differed between inshore and offshore sites and, in general, matched observed signatures of inshore and offshore cod. The Bonavista Corridor cod, however, were an exception, having δ18Ooto signatures suggestive of inshore exposure. Our findings provide direct evidence of metapopulation structure in the Northern cod and are consistent with offshore rebuilding having been spurred by dispersal of cod from inshore Smith Sound.

An Improved Estimation and Gap-Filling Technique for Sea Surface Wind Speeds Using NARX Neural Networks

This work presents the use of a nonlinear autoregressive neural network to obtain an improved estimate of sea surface winds, taking Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, as a study case. The network inputs and delays were chosen through cross correlation with the target variable. The proposed method was compared with five other wind speed estimation techniques, outperforming them in correlation, precision, accuracy, and bias levels. As an extension, the temporal gap filling of missing wind speed data during a storm has been considered. Data containing a measurement gap from a 40-yr windstorm that hit the same location has been used. The proposed method filled the gaps in the dataset with a high degree of correlation with measurements obtained by surrounding stations. The method presented in this work showed promising results that could be extended to estimate wind speeds in other locations and filling gaps in other datasets.